It was a chilly Dutch day when Heracles Almelo hosted Groningen in an Eredivisie match this weekend. The visitors didn’t shrink in the face of the cold, though, and gave it to the hosts long and hard in a 4-1 beating.

The most action-packed bit of the match was when Groningen were rewarded for their incessant and vigorous activity with a veritable eruption of goals towards the end of the first half, the team managing to squirt the ball past the Heracles keeper three times in a span of nine minutes. After the ref finally blew his whistle to bring an and end to Heracles’s limp performance in that first 45 minutes, the club’s groundskeeper was tasked with scraping the wet white stuff that had fallen on the competitors off of the pitch. Almost certainly intentionally, the groundskeeper left a suggestive-looking strip of snow in tact as a metaphorical statement on what he’d just seen.

No doubt some of the Groningen players had been dreading the trip to Almelo, what with the cold and the precipitation portending to make the usually pleasant enterprise less enjoyable than most days, but we’re pretty sure that by the end of it all, they were glad they came.